Fantastic Mr. Fox
2009 (USA / UK)
Director: Wes Anderson
Viewed: November 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)
B+ - Wes Anderson’s distinctive authorial signatures—the fussy, nostalgia-rich production design, the playful movements of his camera, the droll labeling of chapters and even shots—has at times been derided as a dollhouse aesthetic, more suited to playthings than real people. It’s not a criticism I share, but there you have it. One might say that Anderson’s latest feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, responds to such objections by taking them at face value, as it was made using literal dolls. Well, stop-motion puppets, to be precise. A more natural fit between a particular style of animation and a living auteur would be hard to imagine, as Anderson’s propensity for treating every shot as a tableau is given its most ebullient expression yet. There’s something damn near perfect about the marriage of Mr. Fox’s old-school animation—which heartily embraces an aura of toybox unreality—to the director’s natural affinities. Anderson is an artist who thrives on meticulous attention to detail and on making every shot count, and animation provides ample opportunity to indulge such impulses.
Adapting Roald Dahl’s slim children’s novel of the same name, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach necessarily expand the original tale of chicken thievery and vengeful farmers. The film bestows more human qualities on Dahl’s animal characters, constructing a whimsical rural landscape where adult foxes wear suits and write newspaper columns and young foxes go to chemistry class and play Whackbat. (This is a cricket-like game played with a flaming pine cone, whose complexity amusingly and quite deliberately surpasses that of Harry Potter’s quidditch.) Mr. Fox’s characters might speak with American accents, but the clear template for Anderson’s approach to his anthropomorphic animals is The Wind in the Willows. However, the mysticism and class allegory in Grahame’s story is swapped for a distinctly American strain of ambition and discontent, and if there’s one thing that Anderson knows how to do well, it’s portraying talented yet dissatisfied people (or foxes, in this case).
We learn in a prologue that Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is a skilled and irrepressible thief whose exploits have a habit of getting him and his family into hot water. Having been convinced by his wife (Meryl Streep) to give up poultry purloining several fox-years ago, Fox declares that he wants to move out of their earthen den and into a picture-perfect hilltop tree. That said tree overlooks the wealthy farms of the nasty Misters Boggis, Budge, and Bean (one fat, one short, one lean) doesn’t really register with Mrs. Fox. That is, until her husband starts sneaking out with Kylie the Opossum for nighttime raids and the cupboard inexplicably starts filling up with chickens, geese, turkeys, and cider. Eventually the farmers, goaded by the especially unpleasant Bean (Michael Gambon), declare war on the foxes, and a tale of escalating hostilities between men and pest ensues. Along the way, there are several sub-plots, among them the rivalry that develops between Fox’s sour, diminutive son, Ash (Jason Shwartzman) and his visiting cousin, the all-around prodigy Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson).
The Fox family dwells in a marvelous, autumnal-hued landscape of vast skies and rolling hills, reminiscent of a stylized oil painting. Anderson constructs this postcard pastoral setting for its superficial aesthetic charms, not because he’s especially enamored with its ideals. His film’s farmers are not rustic men of the soil, but heartless titans of a modern, mechanized agribusiness, more prosperous kin to Chicken Run’s Mrs. Tweedy. Some class- and race-tinged allusions aside, however, Mr. Fox is chiefly concerned, as all of Anderson’s films are, with personal drama, most especially familial relationships and the reconciliation of desires with reality. Here that latter theme dovetails slyly—though not always elegantly—with the animal characters’ struggles with their wild natures, a problem given its most succinct expression by the hero himself: How can a fox ever be happy without a chicken in its teeth? The profundity of this statement might be dubious, but Mr. Fox is ultimately less concerned with messaging than amusement, and one senses than Anderson derives a great deal of amusement out of hearing such familiar navel-gazing statements issue from a fox’s mouth.
Indeed, what separates Mr. Fox from the rest of Anderson’s output is not its conspicuous animation technique, but its decidedly light tone, even in its gravest moments. (A favorite line: “At the end of the day, he’s still just another drowned rat in a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant.” This is delivered not as a howl of existential despair, but a gag at the expense of the film itself.) If Mr. Fox feels a tad trifling, it’s because Anderson aims to tell a silly little story with such absolute precision, all while winking at us as if to say, “Relax, it’s just a silly little story.” The model trains that clatter through the film hint at the film’s joyous tone and the director’s self-awareness. Like a real-world train enthusiast, Anderson is eager for us to coo with delight at the dense texture of his fuzzy little world, but he never loses sight of the fact that he cares about its minutiae much, much more than we do. Mr. Fox is one of those rare films that feels like a painstaking labor of love for its creator, while only needing to be liked by its audience.
Much will be written about the look of Mr. Fox, with its impossibly detailed design and herky-jerky movements, which brings to mind the Rankin/Bass animated holiday specials. (Anderson, whose soundtrack choices always work more by intuition than logic, even alludes to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by including a couple of Burl Ives tunes.) Suffice to say that the film has forsaken realism for an appealing tangibility, practically inviting the viewer to reach out and stroke its character’s fur or fiddle with its miniature bric-a-brac. If only 2009 hadn’t also given us Henry Selick’s overlooked masterpiece, Coraline, then this would be the best stop-motion feature film in years. The perfection of Coraline’s gothic world is a hard act to follow, and Mr. Fox too willfully clings to its artificiality to surpass that film’s sheer dazzle.
Although the source material is a children’s classic, I hesitate to label Mr. Fox as a children’s film. To be sure, at the screening I attended, all of the young audience members were transfixed, with barely a peep of discontent or boredom to be heard. Unless you regard drinking and smoking characters as too much for young eyes to handle, Mr. Fox is determinedly kid-friendly. One of the film’s most memorable touches is its substitution of “cuss” for swear words, a gag that almost, but never quite, wears out its welcome. (I defy any adult not to titter at the phrase “clustercuss”.) However, this bit of dialog tomfoolery hints that the film’s primary audience is adult. While there is some cartoon slapstick, Anderson and Baumbach prefer the dry, character-centered humor that has come to characterize the former’s films.
The Andersonian approach to character is in evidence throughout Mr. Fox, and while the heroes’ tribulations seem less dire by dint of the fact that they are animated animals, the telltale longing and sadness are still there. The Ash-Kristofferson subplot in particular operates within the male-male rivalry framework the director favors, but it’s also one of the weakest examples of such within his filmography, and the film’s most unsuccessful dramatic note. However, what is most conspicuous is not the film’s potency or lack thereof but the odd fit between its sensory delights and its thorny emotional landscape. (How many other alleged children’s films would dare feature the line, “I love you, but I never should have married you.” And then just leave it out there?) These elements are never completely at ease with one another, save perhaps in an unusual scene late in the film, one filled with a profound melancholy that is inexplicable but wholly right.
It’s easy to declare that the undeniable visual artistry of Fantastic Mr. Fox reveals that the director has always been less a film-maker than a poser of action figures. Yet far from revealing the shallowness of Anderson’s emotional understanding, the winsome pleasures of Mr. Fox throw fresh light on the essential humanity of the director’s films, especially Rushmore and the underrated The Darjeeling Limited. In creating a fluffy fairy tale—a little starched and a little sad, as only he can do it—Anderson underscores his characters’ egotistical need to control their environments, while simultaneously acknowledging how much fun it can be to fashion one’s own little world.
B- - With his reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, J. J. Abrams has chucked out the moralizing and paper-thin social allegory that characterized Gene Rodenberry’s original series and delivered something closer to a Buck Rogers-style swashbuckling space opera. Abrams is keenly aware that for Trekkies and casual viewers alike, the iconic characters are always what lent the series its endurance. His tactic is to transplant those characters into a rollicking adventure, while retaining the physics mumbo-jumbo and desperate gambits that have always been the franchise’s bread-and-butter. The film is also an arch variant on the “Getting the Team Together” formula, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et al. are slotted into place for their syndicated television destiny. Predictably, the elaborate, time-hopping plot is only sketchily conveyed, and without William Shatner’s hammy presence, it is shockingly evident (to this non-Trekkie) that James T. Kirk was always a bit of an asshole. Still, Star Trek is dazzling, giddy stuff, a complete re-purposing of a pop culture institution for distinctly old school cinematic thrills, complete with black holes, monstrous aliens, and doomsday weapons. If Abrams’ only goal was to render Starfleet officers as the badass successors of pirates and cowboys, then mission accomplished.
Agnès Varda cooks up a delicious slice of cinematic heresy with her latest work, The Beaches of Agnès. Could it be that the most invigorating film to emerge from the French New Wave’s aged auteurs in recent years is a whimsical, affecting, exquisitely crafted documentary memoir? Octogenarian Varda, who was the odd woman out within the New Wave’s Boys Club, has created an intensely personal, utterly frank, and wholly lovely film. With a mischievous smile that hints at both her warmth and her restless intellect, Varda narrates the story of her own life. Self-aware yet never apologetic, Beaches strikes the tone of a shared journey. We feel the director’s bemusement, wistfulness, and melancholy as she tours the locales and visits with the people that shaped her art. With Beaches, Varda decisively triumphs over peers such as Rivette, Chabrol, and Resnais, whose late works (The Duchess of Langeais, A Girl Cut in Two, Private Fears in Public Places) have been trifling and ham-fisted. The beauty of Varda’s film is the beauty of herself, presented honestly: a confident, relentlessly curious artist, whose life of achievement has not been diminished by her probing uncertainty or her persistent grief.
There are not many film-makers that simultaneously demand the utmost patience and attentiveness from their audience and also hew to scrupulous realism in their work. This unusual pairing of qualities is what defines the downright vexing films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, who has made four features that exemplify the term “acquired taste.” His latest is Liverpool, which trades the rain forests of Los Muertos for dreary, snowbound Tierra del Fuego. Structurally and thematically, however, this new film is close kin to his 2004 feature, as both train their gaze on a man on a familial quest. Here the protagonist is the lanky, inscrutable Farrel (Juan Fernández), a cargo ship worker who journeys inland to find his ailing mother. The delicacy of Alonso’s observational power is what makes Liverpool such a unusual species of film, but it unfortunately suffers from a suffocating emotional inertness. Most filmgoers will likely find Alonso’s style tedious, if not excruciating, principally due to his seemingly emphatic lingering on banalities. In fact, Liverpool never emphasizes; it only invites observation. It is a grimy, ragged, uncompromising work, but so taxing that only the most disciplined cinephile would dare tackle it more than once.
Noir doesn’t come much more languid than Three Monkeys, a moody Turkish thriller that concerns itself as much with hidden ugliness as it does with naked emotional upheavals. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan sketches this story of loyalty and lust with the thinnest of narrative lines, but via a style that practically howls its themes to the moon. Hence the florid, queasy detail captured with his HD video: slick sweat on greasy skin, lifeless urban spaces of yellow and green, and cloudy skies that seem almost bruised. There are dabs of magical realism as well, as a harrowing specter lurches through and clings to the lives of the principals. Shut up in a cramped apartment but miles away from each other, loutish husband Eyüp, dissatisfied wife Hacer, and troubled son Ismail contend with a maze of lies, all flowing from Eyüp’s fateful decision to take the fall for his boss’s hit-and-run accident. Ceylan doesn’t add sufficient dramatic energy to the proceedings to justify the film’s ostentatious pacing, and Three Monkeys never feels like it connects with his thematic ambitions. Still, as a lusciously stylized–and often deliciously ugly–glimpse of human folly, it’s satisfactory.
Claire Denis’ newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, exhibits a remarkable humanism that takes its time uncoiling and working its spell on you. With an unhurried and affectionate tone, the film weaves the story of a sagging Parisian apartment complex, where widower Lionel (Alex Descas) and his adult daughter Jospehine (Mati Diop) alternately resist and welcome the changes that life brings. Denis demonstrates a profound emotional grace in her approach, coaxing us to share her love of her characters by permitting us to see them without pretense or flattering poses. There is no cloying demand that we share Jo’s fondness for her father. Rather, Denis bestows that fondness on the viewer by shooting Descas in a way that captures the gentleness and pain of his inner life. 35 Shots of Rum succeeds because of its modesty: there is no sense that Denis has constructed this intimate tale for our benefit, and its simple themes are wondrously emergent. Only a shocking and gratuitous development late in the film mars the pleasures of Denis’ empathic observational power, but she rights things with a melancholy, ambiguous coda that nonetheless underlines her story with admirable precision.
Christian Petzold’s lean, sordid little thriller positions itself as a successor to the works of Hitchcock and Wilder, but its most direct ancestor is The Postman Always Rings Twice, to the point that Jerichow might be regarded a near-remake. Here the Frank Chambers part is a penniless Afghan war veteran, Thomas, played with a distinctly Germanic heat by the chiseled Benno Fürmann (also appearing in North Face at this year’s Festival). Recruited into the employ of snack bar entrepreneur Ali (Hilmi Sözer) through the sort of happenstance that seems endemic to noir, Thomas inevitably hooks up with the boss’ wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), a ragged blond who seems like more trouble than she’s worth. Petzold’s script is admirably sparing and suitably tense, especially given that the bulk of story’s action occurs in sun-kissed daylight. The film is resolutely focused on its core conflict, barely permitting any characters other than its three principals to intrude. Its main sin is that it’s a film in search of a purpose. At bottom, Jerichow is a skillful retread of territory that’s already been extensively explored, and Petzold doesn’t bring anything fresh other than some unconventional (but not unexpected) twists in the third act.
Amos Gitai’s camera tightly frames his characters in his Holocaust-cum-family drama, One Day You’ll Understand. The film flirtis with a claustrophobic atmosphere, yet it remains distractingly distant from the unfolding events. In its slackest moments, Gitai’s style exhibits no feeling other than idle curiosity, a odd flaw given the intensely personal character of the story. That story centers on the prying of Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) into his family’s muddled history, which thrusts together Catholics and Russian Jews in Nazi-occupied France with predictably tragic results. Unfortunately, his elderly mother Rivka (a magisterial Jeanne Moreau, one the film’s bright spots) is reluctant to speak of the past. The film’s primary problem is that in trying to weave together two substantial thematic threads–the veiled character of post-WWII Jewish identity in France, and the challenges of birthrights–Gitai fails to give either a sufficiently rich treatment, and the results feels fumbling and hollow. A late scene, wherein Girardot wanders his mother’s flat as it is dismantled for its valuables, plays as a pale echo of Summer Hours. One Day You’ll Understand lacks the focus, grace, and delight for character and space that made Olivier Assayas’ film an exquisite exploration of a mundane subject.
It was only last year that Zhang Ke Jia’s sad, sedate, occasionally whimsical little masterwork, Still Life, landed on American shores. And here we are again with another difficult, gorgeous film, 24 City, that continues to express both Jia’s profound affection for his countrymen and his ambivalence towards China’s modernization. Here Jia adopts a blended documentary-fiction approach, wherein his camera explores the ruins of an munitions complex as it is transformed into luxury high rises, and interviews former factory employees and actors posing as employees. Even more than Still Life, 24 City is a film enamored–in a mournful sort of way–with the industrial and post-industrial spaces of China, echoing Jennifer Baichwal’s ominous and beautiful documentary, Manufactured Landscapes. The wondrous enigma of Jia’s talent is evident here, manifest in his blending of cool observation and authentic, piercing emotion. Grave and challenging, 24 City is a testament to the director’s novel vision, a succesion of sensory pleasures that prods expectations. Oddly enough, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the film is its “Ocean’s Twelve moment”: the use of Joan Chen to portray a women who is known for her resemblance to Joan Chen.
Director Joe Berlinger has had a uneven career–from the definitive West Mephis 3 documentary Paradise Lost to the bafflingly ill-considered Blair Witch 2–but he’s never produced a work of socially-conscious agitprop like Crude. While the film hews to the general tone of slicker docs like The Corporation and Food, Inc., Berlinger has a much tighter focus. Specifically, Crude follows the fifteen-plus-year lawsuit that has pitted Chevron-Texaco against the native peoples of Ecuador allegedly poisoned by the company’s drilling wastes. Strictly as a vehicle for raising awareness about a critical Third World environmental battle, Crude is absorbing and grimly presented stuff, with Berlinger avoiding the smugness or breeziness that plagues many progressive Issues Documentaries. Content to let his subjects speak for themselves, the director presents the story without narration, adding only title cards to explain factual tidbits. Accordingly, Berlinger can be forgiven the romantic character his rough style lends to this David-and-Goliath conflict, and even his dewy delight when celebrities such as the President of Ecuador and Sting get involved in the fight. Ultimately, the plaintiffs couldn’t ask for a more straightforward, concise statement of the political, cultural, and emotional dimensions of their case than Crude.